“This is my last election,” President Barack Obama told then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in comments picked up by a mike in Seoul last March. “After my election, I have more flexibility.”

Obama was referring to Moscow‘s ire at the planned deployment of U.S. missile interceptors (ostensibly defending against Iran) on Russia’s doorstep. Were he to reach an accommodation with the Russians, Obama would enhance prospects for winning Moscow’s cooperation on a number of Administration foreign policy priorities, ranging from arms control and addressing the Iranian nuclear standoff to ending Syria’s increasingly dangerous civil war.

Some even suggest that the flexibility Obama has gained by winning his last election might tempt President Obama to seek to build his legacy in foreign policy — particularly if renewed partisan gridlock on Capitol Hill stymies substantial domestic achievement. But Obama is President of an America whose global leverage and influence have declined sharply since the end of the Cold War, a decline accelerated by the deep crisis facing the American economy and by the failure of military force to impose the U.S.’s will in two major wars over the past decade. As a result, Obama’s foreign policy has been less about any grand strategy than about managing crises in the Middle East and disentangling the U.S. from the expeditionary wars of the Bush era.

Obama’s initial ambition to jump-start the faltering Israeli-Palestinian peace process floundered and with it his efforts to rebuild relations with the Muslim world. His Administration’s attempted “reset” with Russia too was essentially stillborn, while its “pivot to Asia” has been more a feature of rhetoric than a measurable strategic shift. Rather than set the agenda, Obama has largely found himself forced to react to crises in the Middle East and the Afghanistan-Pakistan sphere, managing the challenges of extricating U.S. troops from the Hindu Kush and relying on drone strikes to kill off the U.S.’s enemies there and also in Yemen; averting the dangers posed by the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program by building sanctions pressure on Tehran; and formulating a response to an Arab rebellion that swept aside long-standing U.S. allies and empowered Islamists in their wake. His Administration developed a form of limited military engagement that relied on others to undertake the heavy lifting — known by the ghastly term leading from behind — to help bring down Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, although the killing of four U.S. diplomatic personnel in Benghazi on Sept. 11 highlights the fragility of the resulting order. More recently, the Obama White House has struggled to find similarly low-cost policy levers that could break Syria’s bloody stalemate by ousting President Bashar Assad.

A foreign policy legacy may not seem the obvious goal for Obama to pursue given today’s limits on American power. And he’s clearly mindful of the reality that any restoration of U.S. global fortunes depends first and foremost on repairing the domestic economy.

“Our economy is recovering,” he told cheering supporters at his victory speech in Chicago. “A decade of war is ending … You elected us to focus on your jobs, not ours. And in the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together. Reducing our deficit. Reforming our tax code. Fixing our immigration system. Freeing ourselves from foreign oil. We’ve got more work to do.”

Obama has made plain his determination to avoid new military entanglements abroad and focus instead on rebuilding America — the immense partisan obstacles in his path notwithstanding. Simply avoiding a train wreck in the Middle East will necessitate direct negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, which were reportedly being mooted in the weeks prior to the election. Obama clearly has no appetite for launching a potentially open-ended war of choice against Iran, for which there is precious little support even among Washington’s closest allies — Israel exempted. And the postelection flexibility he signaled to Medvedev may possibly come into play in the search for a compromise with Iran that would halt the slide toward an unintended confrontation.

Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME, where he has covered international conflicts in the Middle East, Asia, and the Balkans since 1997. A native of South Africa, he now resides with his family in Brooklyn, New York.